How Assistive Technology Can Help Prevent Bullying and Mistreatment of Children with Special Needs
Updated on March 13, 2024Recently an AngelSense user recounted how she discovered that her 9-year-old son was being bullied on the school bus.
Unfortunately, such a situation is not unusual. We’ve all heard the numbers. Children with special needs are 2 to 3 times more likely to be bullied than their typically developing peers. We also know that the effects of bullying can be devastating. October is National Bullying Prevention Month and in recognition of this, we’d like to share what we as special needs parents can do for our own children.
Personal GPS trackers for kids are linked in most people‘s minds to monitoring children’s whereabouts as a way to make sure they don’t wander and get lost. This of course is a huge and potentially life-saving benefit. However, the AngelSense Assistive Technology was also designed to help parents identify if bullying or mistreatment of their child is taking place, enabling them to take the action necessary to prevent it from recurring.
Know Your Child is Well
We all wish we could be a fly on the wall and check in on our children when they are not in our care. With AngelSense, a parent suspecting foul play can use the app to hear if their child is ok and what’s going on in their surroundings. This can be done at any point throughout the day and particularly at times when the child may be more vulnerable to bullying or abuse, such as on the school bus or at lunchtime. In fact, you don’t have to wait until you suspect that something is wrong. You can just perform regular ‘well-being checks’ by listening-in every so often. This doesn’t require any action on the part of the child.
Know When Your Child’s Routine Has been Disrupted
AngelSense gives you a detailed timeline of your child’s day: every location they visit, when they arrived, when they left and the time it took them to travel from point to point. You can even see how fast they were going. Follow your child’s route on a live map, whether it be the school bus route or even your child’s own walking route between the various areas of the school campus.
All of this is important for the prevention of bullying and mistreatment because it allows you to easily verify that your child’s schedule is being kept. A deviation from routine could indicate that something is wrong. Red flags warranting further investigation are of course specific to each child and their own unique patterns. But there are examples that apply to most children that parents can use their AngelSense Assistive Technology to keep an eye out for:
- Unexpected stops or an unusually long stop made by the bus driver
- A sudden and unexpected change in travel route
- Late arrivals to routine activities
- Arrival at an unfamiliar place
Make Sure Your Child is Never Left Behind
There have been numerous media reports recently about children with special needs being left behind at school or on field trips. This can end in tragedy, especially in the case of non-verbal children. To counter this, AngelSense has recently launched a new Late Departure Warning capability that sends the parent a text alert if the child remains at any specific location later than expected. This means that if your child has negligently been left alone at school, at the bus stop or any other place they regularly visit, you’ll be alerted immediately.
Give Your Child a Sense of Security
Many parents have told us that the AngelSense Assistive Technology has brought a newfound sense of security and confidence to their special needs child. The child knows that their parents are watching over them at all times, even if they are not physically present. An AngelSense mother shared this about her teenage son with special needs: AngelSense cannot prevent bullying or mistreatment from happening, but it can certainly help parents make sure that a one-time incident does not turn into a damaging pattern in their special child’s life.
AngelSense is committed to creating a safer world for special needs children. We designed the AngelSense Assistive Technology to give parents the peace of mind that their child is safe at all times. Try AngelSense Today.
